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Docker server monitoring without the stack. Metrics, logs, and alerts from your terminal. Single binary, zero exposed ports, SSH-only.

246 starsGo

I replaced Grafana+Prometheus with a Go binary and SSH for my VPSs

by thobiasn·Feb 18, 2026·11 points·0 comments
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AI Analysis

●●●BangerNiche GemSolve My ProblemCozy

Grafana+Prometheus replacement in one Go binary over SSH—zero HTTP, pure pragmatism.

Strengths
  • •Architecture sidesteps infrastructure bloat: single binary, zero dependencies, 7-day SQLite retention beats Prometheus memory footprint
  • •SSH tunnel + Unix socket eliminates exposed ports and HTTP overhead—genuine security and simplicity win
  • •TOML alert rules + email/webhook notifications work immediately; TUI client connects via SSH with no setup
Weaknesses
  • •Still in active development (README disclaimer)—may not be stable for production VPS monitoring yet
  • •Competes against mature Prometheus ecosystem and hosted solutions (Datadog, New Relic), though positioning differs
Target Audience

Solo developers, small teams managing VPSs; DevOps avoiding Grafana/Prometheus overhead

Similar To

Prometheus · Grafana · Netdata

Post Description

I do fullstack dev for work and side projects and recently moved everything to a couple VPSs on hetzner. Great setup, low cost, but one thing kept bugging me, how do I know if something is down without manually sshing in all the time? I tried the grafana + prometheus stack but the configuration time and seeing it use more resources than my actual apps was rough. Tried some smaller solutions too but nothing felt right. So I said screw it and built exactly what I wanted.

tori is a single go binary that runs on your server, reads host metrics from /proc and /sys, monitors containers via the docker socket (read-only), tails logs, and stores everything in sqlite with a 7 day retention. You define alert rules in a toml config and get notified via email or webhooks. The same binary runs on your local machine and connects over SSH via a TUI, no exposed ports, no HTTP server.

https://github.com/thobiasn/tori-cli

MIT licensed, happy to answer questions about the architecture or design choices :)

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